an economy content to deliver AVERAGE

The current economy is optimized to deliver 'average'. Mass economies of scale being the underlying economic rational, the pile them high, sell them low mantra. The economies of stock (think Just in Time, end consumer personalization), being the challenger.

I had an interesting conversation the other week that lead me to conclude there was another force at work too that was driving us towards 'average'. Scarcity is the constraining resource that the science of economics was built on. And while information, in my mind is limitless, the current economy sets out to minimize the availability of information, the logic being the less information there is, the more perceived scarcity is created and the end result is the ability to drive up prices. The case can be made that we now live in a world with unlimited resources, (we produce too many cars to clothing) and the current role of the corporate suppliers is to create the illusions of scarcity, while mass producing average, which they call maximizing profits.

That is the old game for the economy. We are now seeing the re-purposing of the economy to focus on LIFE. Life is unique, we are all unique. This economy is being grown from the grass roots up and is here and now if you want to participate.

Individuals ready for identity empowerment

A call to all identity visionaries, entrepreneurs and existing providers, stop all your technical to technical - business to business conversations and focus all that energy and talent on giving the individual the power to create their own identity. Let the individual users create the market, we will move faster, wider and thus create the environment for an explosion of innovation in this new market place.

Have the courage to take this path. Show leadership.

The empowerment industry

A whole new industry is going to form around empowering the individual. These businesses will provide indentity services, attention services, tools etc. The common nature of all will be that their goal will be to listen to the individual and to deliver the empowerment they need. It is highly unlikely that these businesses will be able to stride both empowering the individual and provide services to another business entity.

It is not because there services won't touch other businesses, they will do, many, maybe many more than exist today but that interaction will come from the empowered individual selecting to engage with a business to serve their demands.

Empower the individual

I have put together this set of picture to illustrate my view on what empowering the individual is about.

h

Center of the universe = The individual

That is the individual, living, breathing and real.

Not, a windows operating system.
Not, an attention operating system.
Not, an identity management operating system.

Us as individuals will tell what mix of the above and other services and tools we require. This will give the suppliers of such services the empowerment to do what they have to do deliver the demand.

I don't believe this world hardly even exists today. As for tomorrow? It will be the norm.

Pinko marketing = telling the truth

Tara Hunt gave a thoughtful presentation at the Attention Trust last night. What is PinkoMarketing? To me it is all about telling the truth. Tara sets out 5 guiding rules/principles guiding this new era of marketing:

1. Listening, listen to your customers, no out bound messages required whether they be advertisements on television, online or email etc.

2. Be community advocates, help your customers by listening to their feedback by participating with them

3. 100% authenticity, live with the highest of ethics

4. Think small, customers in the end of the day are individuals

5. Open source principles, empowering of individuals, no silos of data, no wall gardens to restict information flowing to the customer.


Tara is giving inspiring leadership as we enter this new era of honest information.

P to T to B, NOT TtoT + BtoB Identity empowerment

I have been soaking in all the information I can on where the world is with IDENTITY management. I am greatly encouraged that there is lots going on and it only seems a matter of time before empowered individuals have control over their identity online and on land.

Encouraged that there is a lot of individuals passionate about making this service real and the amount of technical brainpower being applied is vast. I may be calling this wrong based upon my limited involvement in meetings on the subject but I feel all the technical chat is taking our eye of the individual. As the technical chats then evolved to business-to-business chats, e.g. OK, we agree this ABC protocol, then your business and my business will adhere to that standard and then that will open up value to the end user.

I agree such chats are necessary in creating a new service but I feel this strategy is too disconnected from the end user, or individuals that are seeking to manage their identity for themselves.

Here is what I would like to see more of: Individuals are the starting point. We are demand the convenience and the promise of more personalised services and control our identities is a path we want to pursue to get to that value. The demand is here and now but what are we doing with it today? Nothing? We have to wait for until all the TtoT (technical to technical) stuff has been worked out and then for the businesses to act upon those changes. We are dis-empowering individuals from getting directly involved. I feel we could have a much stronger market adoption time line if we get individuals more involved today.

Here is a suggestion: The browsers all offer to remember our identity e.g. usernames and passwords. Why can we not release an identity service that is controlled by the individuals not the browser company today? The service would provide the 'glue' that would automate my log in to all the website I use today. OK, that's the win, no release of personalised information to the website to invite a personalized service as the standard are not complete at that level.

So, in connection with the individual use of the service we can aggregate the user power for website of share interest e.g. at flickr.com and that will show them that XX thousands of people are expressing demand. This will force change at the speed of the individual i.e. true demand and not of those of the technical standards or business deals. This expression of demand is missing for the current market I feel. If I am wrong please send me link to the sites that provide me with this expression of my empowerment.

Expectations & future mind warfare

How do we decide what we are going to do in the next second, minute, hour, day, tomorrow, weekend, next week, year in year out until the next second does not appear?

I think it will take the whole lifetime of this blog to answer but I want to focus on the role Advertising plays in the context of the question above.

My economics studies taught me there were two type of advertising, 1. Provide product/service information to the market, 2. Provides information to persuade demand to choose between products/services. If I recall rightly, the hypothesis is that the second adds no economics value to the wider economy, infect it could be argued it will reduce the size of the overall economy as scarce resources are allocated to create no.2 type advertising, labor, capital, natural resources and time.

By way of a sweeping generalization most income from Internet businesses is in the form of ad's. Well, those are the revenues I am going to focus on. Ad sense, introduced by google, on one hand can be seen as the savour of the Internet economy, a way has been found to make an internet business sustainable, more than that it is a corner stone of an investment portfolio with its Fortune 500 status. Question, is ad sense and the others, yahoo, msn, myspace etc. offering type 1 or type 2 advertising?

It's type 1. Millions upon millions of clicks on ads up to billions of dollars of revenue therefore, it must have provided the individuals with information that they were looking for.

It's type 2. These product/services are already 'real' and are competing for the right to be consumed. In short, they are adding to the cost of other individuals products and diverting scarce resources away from the 'fathering of mankind'.

Both right?

I feel the answer lies in the hands in each and every individual. Do you set out with the goal of building an experience you have aleady envisioned or are you at the mercy of others to influence the future decisions forming in your mind? If you can be persuaded to change via ads is that alright? Even if you know what you are seeking to create, ads can still provide information that will help you create the unique experience you would not be able to create on your own.

Individual empowerment and control suggests and I am of the opinion that type 2 advertising will soon disappear from economic models. What does this mean for ad based businesses? They will go out of business right? Could do, but the smart ones will realize they are in the individual empowering business and the ad income was a stepping stone route they chose to take along the way. The years ahead will tell if that evolution can be made or will a new start ups, pure to the individual empowerment vision arrive and take over?

Individuals will decide.

Attention

I was initially surprised to read this blog posting at the Attention Trust about a member re assessing their commitment to the concept of Attention. However, after some thought I understood their issues and I believe two factor will help the advancement of the attention cause.

1. More debate on the intellectual concept of attention.

2. More practical relevance to every day lifestyles and to business.

I'll expand on point 2. in the context of my start up www.healthXY.com . Lets assume we have launched our service and are empowering baby boomers to live their chosen lifestyle and to minimizing their risk of developing chronic heart disease. It's working great for the boomer and they hear of another new start up that is providing a cancer prevention service. From the baby boomers point of view they have invested a lot of time to capture their lifestyle data and bio profile that is used to personalize the delivery of information that supports their chronic heart disease prevention services. If we did not adhere to the concepts of Attention: the data belonging to the individual, they probably would not sign up to the cancer prevention service. Why? This is obviously not an optimal status for the baby boomer and that is a lost opportunity for the start up. Maybe even to the whole of society as the start up fails due to lack of demand due to the structural silo isolation of the data held at our service. This is not the world we want to create, therefore, our service will enable the baby boomer to export the data they want and import it into the cancer prevention service. Both businesses should also enable the baby boomer to combine the logic of our software and User Interface to create a seamless and easy to use service and experience for the baby boomer.

I believe we need to build a whole portfolio of practical uses for the individual and business. www.root.net focuses on the mortgage market and provides an exchange of all attention data.

More examples will follow.

The Individual

Identity
+
Attention

=

Empowerment


Identity: Read Kaliya Hamlin's, Identity Woman blog to find out more about her and other efforts to empower your identity online.

Attention: It your attention, own it and empower yourself with the help of the Attention Trust or Interra Project.

D.I.Y. Search II

As predicted in the first D.I.Y. Search posting the new services keep coming in this area, the latest being Yahoo! Shoposphere. This service focuses on Yahoo! Shopping content only but how does it compare to Kaboodle.com, wists.com, Clipmarks.com etc. ?

Setup: No need for the addition to the links or the installation of a new toolbar. A positive but that is because they only offer the service over their own content which is a major drawback in the medium and long term.

Clipmarks is the 'heaviest' toolbar to install with Kaboodle and wist using the familiar del.icio.us link URL option.

Collecting content: Shoposphere provide a + to lists at each product. Yahoo! Automatically captures all product data.

The other service provide much more choice here with Clipmarks boarder highlighting being a nice feature.

Adding your comments and ratings: All services provide the ability to add comments and most allow the addition of a star rating. Kaboodle make this easy to do in my opinion.

Comparison Shopping: Shoposphere impresses here with the selection and visualization of products and prices. The list of retailer links in order of price being another convenient feature.

The other service lack substance but I expect to see a lot of innovation in this area.

Social Community and sharing: Shoposphere does not do a great job here. Yahoo! are trying to link into their existing community/people profile/personal home pages but for those of us that choose to host our webpages else where this is a pain.

RSS and feeds: Keep tracking of your list or list from the community with a simple click to your MyYahoo! account. Again, it would be good to see a one click button posting to independent services.

Wists.com community is particularly well presented with the 'show tags' feature bringing big value to shoppers searching niche products.

In the next posting on D.I.Y. search, what can we expect to see from these services and other startups in the near future?

Pre thought search engine

I read about PreviewSeek on techcrunch and they suggested Previewseek help support searchers to apply the right context to their search words. On my review of the service this proved to be limited but having the wiki dictionary link does add pre search education to users.

The most impressive pre search help I have come across has been from our friends at Google. Google labs have the concept of sets and a word predictor e.g. for use on froogle. Become.com also use this technique. Sets are a way for a searcher to express the thoughts in their head when they do not have an exact search word to look for. This is to help identify context I feel and this context can be used to provide better search results.

There is a lot more to value to be provided in the area of pre-search. I predict that the level of service creation in pre search will equal the amount of innovation that has and will continue to be invested in the technology when you press the search button.

I'll highlight what we can expect to see in pre search in a future blog.

Consumer Control with Service Flow

That is what we require from a consumer focused search engine. It should allow us to enter in a medium or format of our choice the search variables i.e. key words, thoughts, images etc. Providing education/support to help build the ideal search profile. The results should be presented in a medium/format that we have chosen along with a set of tools again that we have chosen to allow us to make trade-offs or decisions depending on the task we have set out to achieve. These should hold over time, that is be updated with fresh data and comparison to the original results highlighted, again if we so choose.

In future postings I will highlighting a range of search engines that are delivering on parts of the search engine profiled above.

Consumer D.I.Y. search

We have great entrepreneurs and teams building great search services for us consumers. Making life just that little bit more convenient online. Some of us, hopefully all with time will see the logic of searching by focusing on education pre, during and after a search experience.

Kaboodle.com are equipping us consumers with an online service that enables us to stitch together our own comparison shopping experience. You use their service in harmony with your choice of search engine(s). However, once you have found information you want to remember or to compare against other products they allow you to save it to your own webpage. This allows us consumers to compare information independent of the source website. This is a big deal. As us consumers know for certain their is no bias in presenting this information as we have total control over what is included.

The power of this service takes legs when put in a social community context. Post your searches to the community and benefit from using searches from like minded souls from the community who have made posts to explore new search areas. Key to this is the visualization of trust of community members.

There is going to be a massive amount of innovation in this space I feel. Pre web 2.o days I prototyped a toolbar at www.ecotorch.com to allow consumers to set up shopping templates and then to gather information from any website and then independent of any website the consumer can educate, compare or visualize the search results to assist them make informed decisions. I turned this idea into the concept of a ConsumerPlayer.

Education + Search

Building on the theme of pre-thought by the consumer pre-search. When shopping online this need becomes clear and so much so that this search engine Become.com splits their search service in two with research and shopping search buttons.

This just fits in naturally with the shopping experience. We all set out to find the best product or service to meet our needs or wants. But what product features are available and what are the pros and cons of these? By product feature I mean any attribute that either you or the manufacturer or retailer has choose to provide information on. In effect this is the consumer self educating themselves and become.com are making it more convenient to undertake this task. This convenience extending to highlighting products that meet your shopping criteria.

The key consumer issue with this service is the independence of the links made between the research and products. Is the research biased by paying retailers or manufacturers to plug good reviews of their products? Become.com make it clear this is not the case and that their priority is to the consumer.

General Search

General Search
Google, Yahoo!, MSNsearch,

These services try their best to capture the whole universe of information. With every passing moment this becomes an ever increasing challenge. They provide a great service all in all.

What I feel is missing from the search engine equation are the steps taken by a searcher before typing in a keyword(s). That is to say the human typing in the keyword(s) own education, logic, thoughts and intellect pre-typing in the key search words has an equally important part to play. No matter how high powered the technology hardware, software and brains that put the search service online. Seconds of pre-thought can cut down search time.

I often used to find myself typing a generic keyword and then if the results were too diverse I would then add another pretty generic word etc. However, what I evolved to learn was to think about how I perceived the information I was searching for would look like. For example, if I was searching for a scientific medical report, my thoughts on language would be completely different from searching for a ski resort. (I am going to come back to this point when I have figured about a clearer explanation.)

I use search engines as the starting point to find the first island of new information that will help me find the next piece of information that will further refine what I am looking for. Search to me turns into island hopping to get to where you need to be.

General search is also not just about text, image searching I found can also be a great way to find text information.

Search engine choices

The term Search engine covers a lot of ground so here I group together some services:

General Search
Google, Yahoo!, MSNsearch,

Comparison/Shopping search
Become.com, Froogle, YahooShopping, Kelkoo.com,

independent consumer services
Kaboodle, ConsumerPlayer

Consumer choosing to make a purchase require a retailer to fulfill
Amazon.com, Tesco

With each of these categories having niche or specialist players. I will devote future blogs to these innovative businesses.

Search engines

Search engines play an important role in connecting consumers with information. If it's your first time on the Internet how do you find a search engine? It's a great question because I believe the answer to this question goes a long way to explaining how we select information and then make decisions.

From my experience we don't have much choice. The PC or device that has been purchased will have made the initial choices for you. Choices made by a series of business to business deals that were necessary for the delivery of the PC to the consumer, the business with the biggest influence having the final say. Inherently this is not bad, the world is a better place with PC's? So, we inherit the choices of others and to some degree we will have trusted some business that enabled us to purchase the PC visa vie the other choices in the market at that time.

The browser provided is opened and a search engine will either be presented or a link. Or the consumer will have the information from an offline source that will have educated them the need to use a search engine, assuming they don't just want to live in a one URL online or that they already know all the URL's they will ever need to use! (maybe someday)

Next, how do consumers choose a search engine given a free choice?

Practical Consumer Information

Ok, we have had a bit of theory but what are the information demands of consumers?

If we can believe Internet statistics then surfing for health information tops the polls followed by shopping and product searching. I'll come back to health in a later posting but for now lets focus on shopping info.

Shopping covers many industries/products Amazon.com, travel Expedia.com, music itunes.com, groceries Tesco.com, etc, these example focused at the retail level. The (brand)manufacturers make the products or services e.g. food Mars, Hotels Hilton, music U2, etc. With the Internet evening up the access so that small, local or niche producers can be found, Food FoveranStore, local joiner WBLittlejohn.com (disclaimer, my parents business), niche music The Sundowns, etc.

With the whole supply chain of businesses on the web too. At the other end of the demand chain of information are what I class as information advisors, these cover an equally wide range of sources, e.g. news newspapers, consumer review Which?, Experts environment, fashion Glossy Mags , consumer themselves, blogs etc. All these competing sources online, also have competitors off line, family members, friends or professional advisors you trust.

Each online source aims to make life easy for consumers but consuming lots of 'easy to use' websites becomes complex. And how do we select or find the sources we trust or are willing to trust. The Search Engines come center stage, for the whole web Google, Yahoo!, product Froogle, products with research Become.com, Images Flickr.com, Blogs, music, video etc. I'll examine the role search engines play in the next posting.

To conclude, the consumers world of information is a complex universe which needs to be made simple and easy to consume. Future posting will highlight my views on who's doing what to deliver this goal to consumers.

The History of Information

Here's my take on how we've got to where we are today. . ..

To simplify greatly, well I suppose us humans used facial, hand and body movements to kick it all off. Geoffrey Nunberg has an informative time line on his site. It is interesting to read, time and time again how each wave of information evolution is pulsed along by a never ending tug and pull created from the human need to communicate with each other and technological innovations that gives information wider room to expand into.

Thus giving the opportunity for information to become more freely and openly available. In terms of information volume I like to use the following metaphor to visualize how near the start we are: imagine the size of the universe a micro * ten to the power of -10000 of a second after big bang and compare it to the size of the Universe today, in other words, hold a pea in your hand and compare it to the size of the Universe. So, we are at the earliest of days in my view.